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Political Motive And Bail: The Effect Of Prosecutorial Strategies On Pretrial Decisions In Federal Terrorism Trials, Michael John Clanton

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to understand how prosecutorial strategies affect pretrial decisions in U.S. terrorism trials and how pretrial decisions in turn affect the disposition of those trials. This research builds off of the work of Smith and Damphousse (1996) which compared terrorism indictees to traditional federal offenders. They found that the use of explicit politicality as a prosecution strategy was a significant predictor of both disposition and the sentence length in terrorism trials. This study focuses on the question of whether the use of an explicitly political prosecution strategy impacts pretrial decisions in terrorism cases and whether …

A Matter Of Faith: U.S. Cable News Coverage And Definitions Of Terrorism, Adam Yehia Elrashidi

Media Studies - Theses

What makes an act of violence an act of terrorism? This qualitative study examines the ways in which three U.S.-based cable news networks--MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News--reported and contextualized four violent events within frameworks of terrorism: the mass shooting at Ft. Hood near Killeen, Texas (2009); the mass shooting near Tucson, Arizona (2011); a suicidal plane crash into an IRS building in Austin, Texas (2010); and the attempted bombing of the Federal Reserve in New York, New York (2012).

Although details between these four events seem analogous, the three networks appeared to contextualize only the Ft. Hood rampage and the …

"Operation Stone Garden": A Case Study Of Legitimation Of Violence And The Consequences For Mexican Immigrants In Chaparral, New Mexico, David Haller Mckenney

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

While globalization is widely theorized in terms of apolitical trans-border flows, this paper argues that the so-called "War on Terror," the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the so-called "War on Drugs" have legitimated the use of violence and aggression. This includes criminalization, closure, containment and deportation directed at trans-national flows of immigrants. Immigrants have become conflated with terrorists, drugs, crime and contamination as a generalized "other," to use Simmel's terms; they are typed as suspicious and dangerous strangers. From this perspective I suggest that the rise of contemporary security regimes or "the mobility regime" that emerged well before the …